What is Journalism? The View from under a Stubbie Cap

Abstract

Researchers into journalism have expressed fears about the decline of the public sphere and the rise of tabloid journalism; the old certainties about what counts as journalism at all, never mind good journalism, can no longer be taken for granted. Meanwhile, the teaching of journalism in universities has some difficult issues to face, and not only because of new technologies in a rapidly internationalising industry. Technical integration goes hand in hand with institutional convergence between government, media and education, while the cultural form of journalism evolves into something not always even recognisable as such. Should journalism educators be teaching or resisting shifts in news from power to identity, word to image, government to entertainment, serious to trivial, public to private?

This paper looks at journalism from the point of view of the reading public rather than a political one, and asks what is at stake in considering journalism in the context of everyday life, personal routines, the private consumption of corporate entertainment … and stubbie caps. In this banal but democratic context, journalism competes with other media, and with other knowledge institutions from government to education, to teach critical literacy to publics. Both journalism education itself and cultural research into journalistic forms might benefit from a perspective that focuses on the ‘ethics of reading’ for publics, and not solely on the power and control of producers.